ALUMINIUM was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in Americas capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but because they wanted to show off. How times change. And in aluminiums case they changed because, in the late 1880s, Charles Hall and Paul Héroult worked out how to separate the stuff from its oxide using electricity rather than chemical reducing agents. Now, the founders of Metalysis, a small British firm, hope to do much the same with tantalum, titanium and a host of other recherché and expensive metallic elements including neodymium, tungsten and vanadium.

The effect could be profound. Tantalum is an ingredient of the best electronic capacitors. At the moment it is so expensive ($500-2,000 a kilogram) that it is worth using only in things where size and weight matter a lot, such as mobile phones. Drop that price and it could be deployed more widely. Neodymium is used in the magnets of motors in electric cars. Vanadium and tungsten give strength to steel, but at great expense. And the strength, lightness, high melting point and ability to resist corrosion of titanium make it an ideal material for building aircraft parts, supercars and medical implantsbut it can cost 50 times as much as steel. Guppy Dhariwal, Metalysiss boss, thinks however that the company can make titanium powder (the product of its new process) for less than a tenth of such powders current price.

Concur. Brass bullets wear out a rifle barrel in a few hundred bullets. It makes sense to use brass on bullets for elephants and cape buffalo, but not much else. I can only imagine life of a barrel using tungsten bullets.

Yikes. Rare or not, tungsten is really hard. It would tear up the barrel in short order. Maybe as a jacketed slug, as is already being done (and the benefit there would be the lower cost), since it is close to lead in weight.

Also, just because tungsten and titanium and other similar metals are about to get cheaper, doesn’t mean they’re not still insanely expensive to work with. Both metals require complex tools to work, and very high temperatures for forging.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.